Business Playground

Business Playground

Author: Dave Stewart

Publisher: Pearson Education

Published: 2010-07-13

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 0132118432

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The Business Playground is the definitive guide to creativity and innovation Written by musician/entrepreneur Dave Stewart and branding expert Mark Simmons, The Business Playground offers a revealing look at what creativity is and how to apply it in business through an inspiring mix of scientific studies, anecdotes, high-profile interviews, and thought-provoking games that you can play alone or with your co-workers. The Business Playground is not your average business book. Former Eurythmics band member Dave Stewart turns on his rock and roll charm with personal, inspirational stories from his own career as well as interviews with such innovative and influential thinkers as Mick Jagger, Microsoft’s Paul Allen, and Twitter’s Evan Williams. The legendary Sir Richard Branson makes a guest appearance as the author of the book’s foreword where he sets the tone for this quirky, fun, emminently useful guide to creative business thinking. Whether you’re running a one-man show or heading up a multinational corporation, you’ll discover new techniques for finding and harnessing your creative abilities and putting them to work for your business in this entertaining book. The Business Playground includes real-world examples of innovation in action, as well as substantial and practical techniques that you can use immediately to aid in creative thinking and problem solving. Play the games at the end of each chapter and you’ll learn how to: Ask the right questions so you can find the right answers Rediscover, train, and utilize your innate creative abilities Conduct “the perfect brainstorm”—yes, such a thing really does exist Create a work culture that’s conducive to creativity Help people collaborate with others within and outside of the organization Kill ideas that aren’t working before they waste too much time and too many resources In his foreword Sir Richard Branson says, “Dave and Mark’s enthusiasm for creativity and how it can be applied in business leaps off every page. The Business Playground will bring out the creative child inside all of us and I can’t imagine many readers being left uninspired to try it out for themselves. Their mix of insights about creativity, revealing examples, anecdotes, interviews with creative thinkers, and games make for an entertaining and informative read. If you get half as much out of this book as I did, you’re in for quite a treat.” Join in the fun with the Business Playground Facebook community at: www.facebook.com/businessplayground


Three Pillars of Organization and Leadership in Disruptive Times

Three Pillars of Organization and Leadership in Disruptive Times

Author: Peter Wollmann

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-09-28

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 3030232271

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This book, written by an interdisciplinary team of authors, explores the transformation of organizations in today’s volatile, uncertain, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. It demonstrates the need to manage organizations in a dynamic way, and to revisit and in some cases reinvent working and leadership styles that seemed appropriate during past decades and centuries. In turn, the book puts forward a model based on three distinct pillars of organization and leadership to suit disruptive times: the concepts of 'Sustainable Purpose', 'Travelling Organization', and 'Connecting Resources'. These pillars challenge many of our traditional organizational patterns and meet the need for effective transformative approaches.


Why Startups Fail

Why Startups Fail

Author: Tom Eisenmann

Publisher: Currency

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0593137027

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If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.


How Incumbent Firms Navigate Nascent Digital Platform Ecosystems in the Internet of Things

How Incumbent Firms Navigate Nascent Digital Platform Ecosystems in the Internet of Things

Author: Daniel Hodapp

Publisher: Cuvillier Verlag

Published: 2021-03-17

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 3736963629

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This thesis is focusing on three little-explored contextual conditions that are important for a better understanding of digital platform ecosystems: digital platforms in a nascent stage of maturity, digital platforms built by incumbents, and digital platforms embedded in the IoT phenomenon. Thus, the thesis contributes to the question of how established companies navigating nascent digital platform ecosystems in the IoT. The work builds and contributes to the literature on digital platform ecosystems. Three main contributions are made through explorative qualitative research in the form of Delphi and case studies as well as through systematic literature research on the above-mentioned themes: First, the thesis synthesizes important knowledge about the nascent stage of digital platform ecosystems and identifies value co-creation challenges specific to this early maturity stage. Second, given the increasing importance of established companies in the platform discourse, this thesis identifies the intra- and inter-organizational challenges that incumbent organizations face in building digital platform ecosystems, emphasizing the importance of the organizational type in building a platform ecosystem. Third, the dissertation positions platforms in the IoT as a new digital platform instantiation within the scholarly platform discourse and outlines important phoneme-related characteristics that determine value creation.


Power Moms

Power Moms

Author: Joann S. Lublin

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2021-02-16

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0062954911

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A retired Wall Street Journal editor and mother compares two generations of women—boomers and GenXers—to examine how each navigates the emotional and professional challenges involved in juggling managerial careers and families. For the first time in American history, a significant number of mothers are heading major corporations, including General Motors, Ulta Beauty, and Best Buy. Over the past several decades, women have made gains throughout executive suites. Yet these “Power Moms” still struggle with balancing their management responsibilities with raising children. Joann S. Lublin draws on the experiences of the nation’s two generations of these successful women to measure how far we’ve come—and how far we still need to go. Lublin combines her own insights with those of eighty-five executive mothers across industries—including experienced public-company chiefs such as Carol Bartz, the first woman to command Autodesk and Yahoo; Hershey’s Michele Buck, DuPont’s Ellen Kullman, ITT’s Denise Ramos, and WW International’s Mindy Grossman—and twenty-five of their grown daughters. Lublin reveals how trailblazer boomers, many now in their sixties, often endured sweeping disapproval for their demanding management careers, even as their own daughters sometimes rejected their choices. While the second wave of executive mothers—all under forty-five—handle working parenthood with less angst, they still lead stressful lives. Power Moms provides lessons and advice to help today’s professional women, their families, and their employers navigate this challenging terrain. Lublin looks at the trade-offs mothers are too often forced to make between work and family and the root causes, including the dearth of large-scale paid parental leave and other family-friendly policies. While it celebrates the gains women have made, Power Moms makes clear how much more must be done to make being a working mother easier.


School, Family, and Community Partnerships

School, Family, and Community Partnerships

Author: Joyce L. Epstein

Publisher: Corwin Press

Published: 2018-07-19

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 1483320014

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Strengthen programs of family and community engagement to promote equity and increase student success! When schools, families, and communities collaborate and share responsibility for students′ education, more students succeed in school. Based on 30 years of research and fieldwork, the fourth edition of the bestseller School, Family, and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action, presents tools and guidelines to help develop more effective and more equitable programs of family and community engagement. Written by a team of well-known experts, it provides a theory and framework of six types of involvement for action; up-to-date research on school, family, and community collaboration; and new materials for professional development and on-going technical assistance. Readers also will find: Examples of best practices on the six types of involvement from preschools, and elementary, middle, and high schools Checklists, templates, and evaluations to plan goal-linked partnership programs and assess progress CD-ROM with slides and notes for two presentations: A new awareness session to orient colleagues on the major components of a research-based partnership program, and a full One-Day Team Training Workshop to prepare school teams to develop their partnership programs. As a foundational text, this handbook demonstrates a proven approach to implement and sustain inclusive, goal-linked programs of partnership. It shows how a good partnership program is an essential component of good school organization and school improvement for student success. This book will help every district and all schools strengthen and continually improve their programs of family and community engagement.


Signposts in Cyberspace

Signposts in Cyberspace

Author: National Research Council

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2005-08-07

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0309096405

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The Domain Name System (DNS) enables user-friendly alphanumeric namesâ€"domain namesâ€"to be assigned to Internet sites. Many of these names have gained economic, social, and political value, leading to conflicts over their ownership, especially names containing trademarked terms. Congress, in P.L. 105-305, directed the Department of Commerce to request the NRC to perform a study of these issues. When the study was initiated, steps were already underway to address the resolution of domain name conflicts, but the continued rapid expansion of the use of the Internet had raised a number of additional policy and technical issues. Furthermore, it became clear that the introduction of search engines and other tools for Internet navigation was affecting the DNS. Consequently, the study was expanded to include policy and technical issues related to the DNS in the context of Internet navigation. This report presents the NRC's assessment of the current state and future prospects of the DNS and Internet navigation, and its conclusions and recommendations concerning key technical and policy issues.


The Big Book of Conflict Resolution Games: Quick, Effective Activities to Improve Communication, Trust and Collaboration

The Big Book of Conflict Resolution Games: Quick, Effective Activities to Improve Communication, Trust and Collaboration

Author: Mary Scannell

Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional

Published: 2010-05-28

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0071743669

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Make workplace conflict resolution a game that EVERYBODY wins! Recent studies show that typical managers devote more than a quarter of their time to resolving coworker disputes. The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games offers a wealth of activities and exercises for groups of any size that let you manage your business (instead of managing personalities). Part of the acclaimed, bestselling Big Books series, this guide offers step-by-step directions and customizable tools that empower you to heal rifts arising from ineffective communication, cultural/personality clashes, and other specific problem areas—before they affect your organization's bottom line. Let The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games help you to: Build trust Foster morale Improve processes Overcome diversity issues And more Dozens of physical and verbal activities help create a safe environment for teams to explore several common forms of conflict—and their resolution. Inexpensive, easy-to-implement, and proved effective at Fortune 500 corporations and mom-and-pop businesses alike, the exercises in The Big Book of Conflict-Resolution Games delivers everything you need to make your workplace more efficient, effective, and engaged.


Human Resources Kit For Dummies

Human Resources Kit For Dummies

Author: Andrea Butcher

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2023-03-28

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 1119989892

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The talent professional’s one-stop reference for best practices and tips Human Resources Kit For Dummies is the guide talent pros turn to for improving their leadership across the businesses they serve. The world of HR is full of unforeseen challenges, and this For Dummies reference will help you to handle them with grace and professionalism. This book provides tips and tricks for creating an engaging employee experience from the get-go, prioritizing employee well-being and health, navigating the recent wave of resignations, and implementing better hiring practices. In this new era of virtual offices, you’ll also learn to implement remote and hybrid onboarding and work models. Plus, you’ll explore HR technologies, learning and development strategies that get results, hiring ethics, diversity and inclusion best practices, social media uses and policies, and beyond. Learn all the functions of the human resources role Discover new software, HR best practices, and employment trends Make your organization more ethical with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives Get insights on how to navigate remote workers and other common HR challenges New and working HR professionals will love this friendly, easy-to-read resource for developing HR skills. If you’re a business owner, this book can also help you recruit, hire, and retain the right people, or build an HR function that gets results!